Editorial

Writing from South America, after reading the 10 articles presented in this volume, I tend to look first at some common issues that touch us all, children and adults alike, at this critical historical moment, going from the more general to the more specific topics.

• 1. The three first articles describe pedagogical experiences with groups of children, which touch some of our world’s most serious challenges: respect for humanistic values, such as democracy, acceptance of social and cultural diversity, and respect for our natural environment. Those issues are focused by qualitative analysis of pedagogical interventions developed at early childhood schools in Croatia, Singapore and South Korea.

A six months pedagogical intervention in a Croatian kindergarten, adopted an action research approach, working with 11 adults and 314 children. The article describes how they started to discuss and promote changes in their spatial-material environment, creating spaces where children could ‘live the principles of democracy and democratic decision-making’, according to the national official curriculum guidelines. In the following periods, a documentation process was introduced, leading to more respect for children’s interests and more cooperation between participants. As many other experiences show, traditionalism in school’s daily practices is hard to change; but the study suggests that a participative methodology can be an important tool for testing ways to overcome it.

Another educational experience, with 11 three and four years old children from a ‘mega centre’ of 1000 children in Singapore, tried to deal with a complex issue: prejudice and discrimination in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors show how young children are aware of many forms of social discrimination in a multi-ethnic country, and how these prejudices can be discussed with them using the Mosaic approach. This intervention, carried out by the ‘teacher-researcher’, followed four anti-bias educational key goals: identity, diversity, justice and activism. Examples of dialogues between the researcher and the children during this process show how this methodology can help educators engage in this kind of discussion with small children, letting them express, discuss and eventually change some social and cultural bias present in their family and social environment.

The third study deals with another important global issue: the preservation of our natural environment. It describes an intervention carried out with 20 preschool children from a South Korea suburban area. Three to five children, in a quiet space, read books with the researcher, expressing their reactions to stories about the topic ‘respect for life’. Books about animals were more appreciated and opened the way for discussions about endangered species, effects of human activity, and danger of animal’s extinction. The author comments that at some moments children were shocked about these facts, and ‘expressed intense emotions like rage’ (12). We know that a teacher or a researcher must address these reactions with care; I was reassured by the information that UNICEF was going to create a ‘child-friendly city’ where the children live (13), what can open possibilities for children’s positive participation in a community change project.

• 2. A second important theme presented in two research reports focus on how early childhood services can deal with some community’s social needs.

A research in Northern Ireland shows how mothers from a rural area describe their participation in the Sure Start programme, which offers a series of workshops and activities for families with babies and toddlers. Despite the use of the expression ‘parental participation’, this study is based on a sample of 10 mothers, described as ‘working full time mums’ or ‘stay at home mums’ (7). The interviews reveal how participation in some of the offered activities helps the individual mothers become part of a group, and not just stay ‘in the house on your own … ’ (10). The article recognizes that this programme mainly meets the needs of non-working or on-leave mothers and their smaller children. This is an important conclusion, which touch gender issues, and must be addressed by these kinds of social programmes.

A research developed in Norway focuses on another link between small children and their communities, an intergenerational programme, affected by the pandemic crisis, when older people had to be isolated in order to prevent contagion by the Covid-19 virus. Based on 58 online interviews and a focus group discussion with kindergarten practitioners, a thematic content analysis revealed how the safety measures adopted in this period hindered the former organization of this programme, but at the same time, this new situation was a stimulus for practitioners to find new creative ways of moving forward, engaging families and communities.

• 3. Teacher’s role, formation itineraries and professional experiences are the subjects of some very interesting research approaches, based on extensive reviews of literature, presented by another three articles, two from Portugal, and one from Finland.

The first of them discusses teacher’s beliefs about the small child at two moments of their initial teacher education course in Portugal: before and after the practical stage at the master degree level. Analysis of 34 students’ written narratives at each one of these moments shows some changes in their conceptions, with more images of the child as an agent, a subject of rights and an unique being (6), while before the practical stage, one-third of them characterized children as passive. The authors acknowledge that some conditions are necessary for those changed images really continue to guide their future professional work as small children teachers.

The second research examines teachers’ verbalization and aspects of their interactive behaviour during an activity with kindergarten children, following the Tandem methodology, first developed in Germany. A group of 64 teachers from Lisbon schools – all female - with at least five years of experience, were videotaped while developing a ‘quasi-experimental activity’ with 64 children aged from 3 to 5. Each dyad had 20 minutes to use the Tandem materials and tools to create some object. Using the prescribed scoring guidelines and descriptive statistics, a very detailed account of verbal and interactive behaviour of educators was obtained. Among many relevant findings, results show that boys and older children were the ones who received less positive feedbacks from teachers.

In Finland, professional experiences of 272 pre-primary and early primary school teachers were investigated, following a four years period of national educational reforms adopted since 2014. The study focused on factors like knowledge sharing and professional environment fit, to investigate how teachers experienced their professional work in a time of new challenges brought about by the reforms; authors were particularly worried about burnout symptoms. Using three different scales, the survey data were collected at school staff meetings. A very detailed statistical analysis led to the identification of three different teacher profiles. It is not unexpected that, in a country like Finland, teachers from all three profiles showed a low risk of suffering from burnout; but the authors recognize that this could change after a longer period of experience with the educational reforms.

• 4. The last two articles look at more specific language development aspects at the transition from preschool to primary school.

A research with preschool children from Greece examines different ways employed by experimental and control groups when retelling stories. Children came from six schools in Crete semi-urban and rural areas; 51 children at four of these schools composed the experimental group. With this group, it was employed specific ways of helping children answer questions after listening to stories from 10 chosen books. As expected, statistic measures showed significant differences in each group’s performance. In the experimental group, girls had better results than boys.

From Norway, a retrospective study compared information about a sample of 851 children’s reading skills, measured by the official reading test applied to all children at the fifth grade, with their previous language skills as toddlers, evaluated by their teachers at early childhood institutions in Stavanger, using a special instrument. A statistical analysis of these results showed that scores obtained at these two different moments of the children’s school experiences were related, at all three levels defined by the national test applied at the fifth grade. Even taking into consideration the authors’ prudent warning ‘the study is not designed to show causal relationships’ (11), it is always risky to propose specific interventions that target groups of small children based on test results at such early ages, as they suggest at the end of their report.

All 10 articles, grouped in 4 sets by this editorial, represent important contributions to the early childhood field. But, as Cameron and Miller (2014) suggest, ‘it is more effective, and more respectful of cultural traditions and local social and political issues, to use international evidence as stimuli for self-questioning, provoking debate and identifying values and goals to work towards’ (158).

Even so, it is somewhat reassuring that children’s voices and reactions described in many of these research reports can sound so familiar to me, despite the different surroundings, cultures and social realities. Perhaps this historical moment, when most children from the age three or four, in many countries, go to some kind of collective space, where they spend part of their days with other children of the same age, doing similar activities, usually proposed and/or supervised by female adults, make us imagine ourselves at their side, despite our different languages, and diverse natural, social and institutional environments.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.